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SADFACE (formerly Looking for a new video card for under £100)

(edited later to add that the new card doesn't work -- if you can offer any advice/opinions please scroll down to where I describe what's up. Also, sad face.)

I think I fried my video card. Sadface.

So, a replacement card! Something under £100 because my budget is slim at the moment, and if possible something that will offer a performance gain over my old* card, which is a 512Mb Radeon HD 2900. I'm not especially tied to ATI/AMD if nVidia is currently ruling the roost at that price range. If it makes any difference, I have no real interest in DX11, since I'm a Vista user.

Recommendations? Please? Thank you?

* Look at me, all calling it my old card already. No loyalty -- that's me.

Personally I'd go for a second hand 4890/70 for £50 or so and save up for something else. Otherwise 5770 is a good bet though if you can find a cut price 460 or 5850 a smidge over budget that might be a better bet.

The most recent PC-Gamer has a feature on sub-£200 cards. I realise that's over your budget but id does include the GeForce GTX 550 Ti at £113 and the N460GTX Hawk at £128 if you can manage to go slightly over budget/find a better price. They get 77% and 88% respectively.

If we're talking slightly over budget probably the best deal at the minute is a XFX 6870 from Scan which can be had for £126 on their today only page (Near the bottom of the super savers section). You also get a free copy of Dirt 3 and AMD are also running a Shogun 2 promotion which you should qualify for that could possibly justify going a smidge over budget. You can also get free delivery for joining certain forums. A 6870 would be a decent step up from a 550ti or a 5770. Mine can pretty much play anything at 1920x1080 with all the fancy stuff turned on.

If you really can't go over £100 then they have a 550ti which is £93.59 on Today Only (In the nVidia graphics section). If memory serves a 550ti is slightly better than 5770.

Scan is pretty good, also try out ebuyer.com ( When doing a search for components for my new rig I built within the last few days they managed to save me £20 and all my stuff! Which was then spent on chinese while building it xD) overclockers.co.uk Isn't to bad either If you can find something you want in the deals

Scan, eBuyer, Dabs and Amazon are my normal go-tos - Scan used to have some customer service problems, but I've heard a lot of praise recently. I know Amazon seems odd and I'd never used them for a a full build, but every so often they undercut the others on a few items hugely (they had the new 600gb Velociraptor for £40 cheaper than anywhere else for a while). Microdirect are reliable too.

Oh, just to check - have you opened up your case and cleaned all the dust off the card? Can make a huge difference.

Yeah, you may not have actually fried your card, since it's (sort of) working.

On the other hand:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rd,2964-3.html
That's where I usually go for a quick comparison of what's good at any given time. They usually push out one of those once per month, so expect another one in about a week. Anyway, for the most up-to-date article in the 155$ range (close to 100 pounds, I think), you're looking at a Radeon 6790 or a nVidia GTX 460 768 MB (note, not the same as the 460 1GB).

So, I'm resurrecting this thread to say that -- the horror -- my new card does not appear to work! When it's installed in the machine, the machine fails to boot even as far as BIOS, even when I've told the machine in BIOS to use the onboard video output. When I take the card out, everything boots as it should.

Does this soud like a familiar issue to anyone? Is there anything I can do other than RMAing it?

This tool, which a couple of reliable souces link to, http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp says I only need 350W, and that's with me padding things a bit (claiming more HDDs and DVD drives, etc). I would be thoroughly pissed if I bought a new PSU and things still didn't work. How do I decide what to do? Should I just RMA the card and hope for the best?